Managed Blockchain Service Introduced By Amazon Web Services

During the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, AWS CEO Andy Jassy unveiled two new blockchain products – Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain – for developers. The new services will reportedly help companies manage business transactions that require full auditability.

Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority. It tracks each and every application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time. Amazon claims that QLDB is a new class of database that eliminates the need to engage in the complex development effort of building ledger-like applications. Amazon QLDB doesn’t require distributed consensus, so it can execute two to three times as many transactions in the same time as common blockchain frameworks. The service can be applied in Finance, Manufacturing, Insurance, HR & Payroll and Retail & Supply Chain.

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. It eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. It can also replicate an immutable copy of a blockchain network activity into Amazon QLDB, allowing developers to easily analyze the network activity outside the network and gain insights into trends.

“This service is going to make it much easier for customers to use the two most popular blockchain frameworks,” Jassy said, adding that mortgages, healthcare records, supply chain tracking and vehicle history records as common customer use cases.

Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Blockchain at AWS. said that many of their customers want to build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without a central, trusted authority, and they also need to create a blockchain network.

“Building a scalable blockchain network with existing technologies is just too hard today, and that’s why customers pay expensive consultants to help them,” said Pathak. “Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the muck involved in setting up a network, adding and removing members, and scaling to meet application demands.”